The Stork Has Landed

I flew across the land today, northeastward, while my friends frolicked warm in California or headed for Acapulco. I set my mind on doing this the way a certain kind of stork decided back in August.

Funny how a eucalyptus sways in California as if belongs there. It feels the air and knows it. But my Pasadena bark shivers in this Minnesota air, and my landlord says how nice a day it is. How long can a swaying eucalyptus stay rooted in a frozen land?

I put my things in the rented room and headed out this evening, looking for bearings, sights on which to hang my stay. The air was about forty degrees and the wind was nil. At five in the afternoon the sun was down and darkness was covering the watery boundary between us and Canada.

I am tired and will settle into northland sleep soon, but hate to leave this day, for it is only one containing both Southern California and Minnesota, having at its ends both warm and cold.

I took my assigned seat 28A early this morning at LAX, one of three adjoining seats. But happily nobody sat in my row. Already, I was alone, reading Thoreau and happy. As I looked left during ascent, long shadows pointed westward from LA’s tall buildings on Bunker Hill. And so soon over the desert, peaks beyond the San Gabriels cast shadows that amplify their north-south topography while diminishing the east-west features, as if they had certain aspects of their personalities to show off.

I see snow even on the desert peaks, but their shadows on the piedmonts are black. I remember how the webcam at International Falls showed me an absence of snow, and thought it strange on the hot desert. Stranger, how this eggshell-thin film of hazy air that surrounds our spheroid of rock captures this buzzing shell I ride in, like a fly caught between solid window glass and the impenetrable screen of ionosphere, a gap from which it cannot escape.

Now, we fly over the high end of the Midwest, sheeted in white snow. East sides of hills collect more snow than west sides, evidence of nor’easters as the source. I shiver a little in these migrating wings, just watching its white expanse, knowing that in the belly of this bird my snowshoes and skis await. On the plane’s left side, where the morning sun does not come in, my views are to the north without glare of sun’s reflection on the snow.

Now, over the lower Midwest, no snow covers the fields, and I see their rectangles or circles, depending on styles irrigation. I remember the 2007 pedal west, rising across Kansas and Colorado, now played in reverse and much faster.

A plane overtakes us, a little faster, a little higher, its tail a hundred times its length, a dog’s tail, near white, but a hint of brown, tainted with some exposure to worldly filth, unmentionable byproduct of a dog’s goodness.

Now, a great river meanders, perhaps the Mississippi, wide as two irrigation circles, which I believe makes it a mile wide. It almost shortcuts a piece of itself, and leaves a lake behind.

From Minneapolis it’s an hour hop on a small bird to International Falls. Lakes dot the north of Minnesota where glacial ice long ago rounded the hills into green and gold dunes before stopping to melt in huge chunks, like ice cubes in a tray.

(The two pictures below were taken over north Minnesota as I flew from Minneapolis.
Click on any picture to enlarge it.)













I must sleep now or wax silly. Here is my first sunset and my first look at the waterway separating us from Canada.

Thanks for listening.